Curious director Taika Waititi sets box office records again with Hunt for The Wilderpeople

Curious director Taika Waititi has set box office records again, this time with ‘Hunt for The Wilderpeople’.

It was invited to premiere at Sundance Film Festival in the most prestigious time slot, Friday night at the Eccles theatre on the opening weekend of the festival in January.

It opened in cinemas in New Zealand in April.

Waititi’s new film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, has broken Kiwi box office records in its opening weekend. It has also set a record for the single highest grossing day for a Kiwi film, pulling in AU$474,000 (NZ$528,000) on Saturday.

Waititi, also won a 2015 Cannes Gold Lion, a D&AD Pencil and Best Ads’ Best Interactive for the NZTA Snapchat campaign, Tinnyvision.

Grossing AU$1.13 million (NZ$1.3 million), Hunt for the Wilderpeople broke the opening weekend box office for Waititi’s 2010 film, Boy. Boy became the highest grossing New Zealand film of all time, making AU$8.3 million (NZ$9.24 million) in total. Wilderpeople also broke the opening weekend record in New Zealand, set in 1999 by What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, the sequel to Once Were Warrior.

Waititi’s previous movie, 2014’s What We Do in the Shadows, grossed more than AU$2.25 million (NZ$2.5 million) at NZ cinemas.

Says Waititi: “We’ve beaten Boy’s opening weekend box office which made me kind of sad. But then I got over it really quick and now I’m stoked. There’s nothing like seeing a film the way it was meant to be seen – on a giant screen with other people, and we couldn’t be more proud and happy that Kiwis are heading along and all our hard work is being appreciated. Thank you New Zealand.”

It is estimated that 100,000 people have seen the movie in its first four days at cinemas in New Zealand. Wilderpeople even outsold Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, which took AU$666,000 (NZ$741,000) on its second weekend – and slid down to second place.

Curious Film executive producer and managing partner, Matt Noonan is a producer of the film and Curious also did all the post production in house. Curious editor and post producer, Luke Haigh, is one of the film’s three editors.

Julian Deniston, who was the lead in the Taika Waititi NZTA short film, Blazed, produced by Curious, plays Ricky Baker in the new film, which stars Sam Neill. The film is Waititi’s dramatisation of Barry Crump’s 1986 novel, Wild Pork and Watercress.

Says Waititi: “It’s a quick read and really engaging and I recommend it to everyone. It’s so entertaining, quite beautifully written and profound…It’s simple, and I don’t mean simple as in not having any substance, but a minimalist style, straight to the point. Hemingway also had a minimalist style and that’s the kind of writing I like: not flowery and over the top, but straight up.”

For Waititi, it marks a return to New Zealand’s classic style of filmmaking, in which humour has a pivotal role.

Says Waititi: “We’re trying to do something accessible to everyone. We want this to be a film that families can go to. A film where there’s something for everyone.

“We want to spin a good yarn and have an adventure…start a resurgence of entertaining New Zealand films. Adventure films like Came a Hot Friday – films where people are fighting against the system but in a fun way. We’ve lost a bit of that in our filmmaking, we’ve been really dark and trying to be quite arty.”